At one point Anne Rice had an essay like this on her website, which was linked to on Fandom Wank and a few places on Livejournal. I went checking and the current comments of Rice's have made it on Fandom Wank again.

This time she's being compared to fanfic writers on ego trips "U don't understand my vision!!1!1!"

The real question is, will -izzle be anything more than a goof? I suspect not. People use "quiz" without irony all the time, but when people say -izzle, they're referencing Snoop or his attitude or the underlying joke of sound-insertion.

The best editor story I ever heard came from Creepy Bob Cormier, who was the gentlest white-haired old man, writing the freakiest doomful teen-angst novels, ever in existence. He said once he spent 45 minutes on the phone with his editor in New York (he lived in Fitchburg) arguing back and forth over the word "however" in the middle of a paragraph. She felt strongly (and eventually convinced him) that it should be "but" instead, because it was appropriate to the narrative voice, and because it was a better rhythm within the paragraph.

He was telling the story to show that his editor was some kind of lovable dedicated maniac, spending 45 minutes on a single word, but the fact is, she did convince him in the end, and he was grateful. (He's also the sort of novelist who wrote for 40 years, and had an editor the whole time. I mean, he was a newsman during the day, so maybe he was just comfortable with editors. Yes, I know news editors are totally different from book editors.)

After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments.

Note to Anne: Declarations of how flawless your unedited writing is would be so much more convincing without the blatant misuse of "anymore" right there in the first sentence.

This time she's being compared to fanfic writers on ego trips "U don't understand my vision!!1!1!"

That's fantastic.

Signed, Pro-editing, especially for mega-seller types like Rice, King, etc.

I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation.

The cosmic justice in all this? Typo in the above.

"U don't understand my vision!!1!1!"

Hee!

No sweetie, I don't- perhaps we should discuss what a writer/author does, and why that's more your problem than mine.

William Safire on how the Grey Lady finally embraced the izzle.

My favorite quote from the story:

The case, Mr. Justice Lewison (seems they don't allow judges to have first names in England) told the BBC, "led to the faintly surreal experience of three gentlemen in horsehair wigs examining the meaning of such phrases as ... shizzle my nizzle." A truly remarkable bit of jurisprudence.

A truly remarkable bit of jurisprudence.

Fo shizzle.

Also, Buffista Rule #48 is one of the many reasons I keep coming back to this oddly-endearing website.

I know this isn't the point at all (point = Anne Rice would benefit from editing, even if she disagrees), but music is a time-lapse collaboration. I've had conductors explicitly go against directions in the music -- making things slower, or louder, or whatever, than the composer intended. So, no one might have said it to Copeland, but people are free to do it anyway.

I suppose both Rice and King (the two most prominent offenders in the Author in Desperate Need of an Editor category) have something in that their free hand with their (over)writing doesn't seem to reduce readability to the point of costing them their readers. Both sell an ungodly number of books with each new release, when many (most?) authors are one step above having to print their own work with a vanity press.

Mind you, both lost me as a consumer of their novels years ago. (Though I've happily rediscovered my love for King's short stories this year...)

In other news, I finally finished reading Ryng's The King in Yellow today on my break. It wasn't as bad as I feared from the opening pages, getting somewhat stronger and less modernly grating in the second act. But I still think it's vastly inferior to the shorter partial version Blish wrote in his story "More Light." And neither version strikes me as following up on the promise of something that's supposedly so brilliant and blasphemous that authorities would ban it (never mind the driving readers crazy part, which is a taller order than I think any writer could manage).